About Nathalie B.
The Day The Meadow Spoke...
I was eight the first time the bees found me. One spring afternoon, in my mother’s garden in the South of France, I wandered off the beaten path (that will turn out to be a recurring theme in my life!), drawn by a soft hum rising from a patch of lavender. As I got closer, I noticed the air shimmered with movement : honey bees were busily drifting between the flowers, their golden bodies dusted with sunlight and shimmering like little light fairies. I stood very still, not afraid but fascinated, and one graciously settled on my hand. For the next 2 minutes, the world went still except for its faint vibration against my skin, so perfectly illustrating the feeling of life at work and my connection to it. I was struck with awe, absolutely mesmerized!
I didn’t yet understand how that experience would later change my life, only that it felt extraordinary. That Spring, still thinking about that moment, I spent hours at the library writing a report about the dance language of bees, sketching figure eights and flowers, fascinated by the idea that bees could communicate so much through movement. That project didn’t satisfy my curiosity; it deepened it. From then on, every garden buzz and field hum pulled me closer into their world.
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Three decades later, in the Spring of my 40th year, I finally brought home my first colony. What began as a single hive rekindled that same childhood wonder, and quickly grew into an all encompassing passion. Today, that spark has become Bee Mindful: more than 400 thriving colonies, 2 diverse teaching apiaries, and a life devoted to helping others discover the beauty, intelligence, and resilience of bees.
BIO
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Nathalie B. is an internationally recognized speaker and advocate for Treatment-Free, sustainable beekeeping, best known for promoting Horizontal Top-Bar Hives as a simple, affordable, accessible, and easy-to-manage option for backyard beekeepers.
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She optimized and redesigned existing plans to create a global standard for Top-Bar Hive designs, allowing cross-country interchangeability of hives and comb for suppliers and customers.
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She invented the Flex Hive, an internationally acclaimed Langstroth-to-Top-Bar adapter, which she was invited to present on at Apimondia 2025 in Copenhagen.
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A regular speaker at regional and national events, she was recently invited as a keynote speaker for the Natural Beekeeping Summit and a three-week speaking tour in Australia.
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In 2019, she was invited by the Congolese government to design and lead the country's training programs for the national trade schools, and spent almost a year setting up teaching apiaries, writing training manuals in French, and setting up training for new beekeepers.
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Passionate about community outreach, Nathalie has developed training programs and teaching apiaries for refugees in Congo, Nigeria, and Texas, and launched multiple Youth Scholarship Programs, donating dozens of horizontal hives in the process.
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An Ohio State MBA graduate and Master Beekeeper with 15 years of experience managing all hive styles and nearly 400 colonies, she is the Owner of Bee Mindful, a full-service beekeeping business offering free plans, comprehensive apprenticeships, workshops in Natural beekeeping, AG exemption services, affordable, practical horizontal hives and Treatment-Free bees.
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She also serves and has served as President, Vice President, Chairman of the Board, and Director in multiple Texas state-level beekeeper associations.
Did you know that May 20th is World Bee Day?
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Trivia 1: Charles Dadant, a famous French-American beekeeper, the inventor of the Dadant beehive, and one of the founding fathers of modern beekeeping, was born on May 20th.
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Triva 2: That day is also the celebrated birthdate of Anton Janša from Slovenia, the first teacher of modern beekeeping, and the reason we now celebrate World Bee Day on May 20th: he was so talented that Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa appointed him headmaster at the world’s first beekeeping school.
How serendipitous then that, as a teacher of beekeeping classes, Nathalie's own birthday is also May 20th, World Bee Day, after the first teacher of modern beekeeping?
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